An integrated knowledge management system for the clinical laboratories: an initial application of an architectural model

eLABook is a web-distributed knowledge management system designed to support the needs of clinicians and laboratory staff in the selection and interpretation of investigations in laboratory medicine. Access can be by hyperlinks at any point through the request-report cycle, by browsing down a hierarchy, and by various search approaches. The information describes service issues, which are predominantly locally determined, and clinical implications, which may be local, national, governmental and international. The application has been implemented across the Oxford Clinical Intranet to support secondary care in the four hospital sites of the Oxford Radcliffe Hospitals and by general practitioners in Oxfordshire. The knowledge base is capable of rapid changes in response to input from both developers and users. It supports authoring, editing and a full audit trail of changes. The selected architecture allows very large scale hierarchical structures and is designed to accommodate future needs for an object-distributed processing deployment.